Reflections on Art in the Age of Social Media

As I descend further into the virus scape of this year of our viral overlord 2923, I am drawn to further reflection on how thankful I am for metal and contemplative music. Happiest of birthdays to @bloodincantationofficial’s Timewave Zero album, which turned 1 yesterday. As had been customary with my experience with Blood Incantation, each album has opened new questions and horizons to explore. Look, I’m not as cool as these cats in this band. By most metrics, I am just a dad metalhead poser, which is fine. You learn to embrace a certain level of self deprecation as you get older and explore new parts of our culture. I just appreciate that they explore music and try to find there own way to articulate and integrate the sounds that matter to them. That’s art. I love their art. In this f’in capitalist colonized context, they have set out to make music that means something. Well at least it means something to me, and honestly, that’s all that even matters anymore. I don’t give two shits about most of the art world, but damn do I love me some Blood Incantation.

Art in the age of social media is on my mind of late. I have been posting my own art on instagram for upwards of 6 years as a fiber artist. It has been surreal to see things evolve over time. I mean, shoot, there wasn’t even video functionality back in the day, so the basics of photography mattered. You had to take well-light, well-composed photos of your work to have it shine for people browsing hashtags. The result of that culture was an explosion of people sharing what they made with their hands and sharing vulnerable stories about their own struggles and triumphs in life. That’s the art culture I came up in. I didn’t go to art school. I just muddle along following my own line of inquiry, as I was trained to do in graduate school. So, one could easily say that social media will always be something that I wax poetic about. Even in the time period I came up in, people were bemoaning the loss of a chronological scrolling experience.

One cannot overestimate the effect that video and meme culture has had on social media platforms like Instagram. Like everyone with a big following or who wishes they have a big following on instagram will put together the meme deck or the curated deck of videos. Its gone from a place of sharing creations to recycling content from other places. Yet, the recycling seems to me to be an example of Jean Baudrillard’s argument in Simulcra and Simulation that capitalism drives humans into creating copies of copies of copies of other things, effectively creating an illusory culture where we lose touch with what is real. Maybe I am being dramatic. Maybe the inhaler that I got from the pharmacy just now is hitting too good and I am feeling TOO comfortable.

I believe that a culture where we just recycle media into infinity with pithy, sharp sayings attached really doesn’t serve us. So save your meme decks, your curated video mood boards, and your selection of twitter hot takes. Honestly, I just want you to elaborate on your experience of being alive in this moment, facing an inevitable death. You don’t need to hide behind cultural references. Just show me your art.

Making this argument about internet culture is hard, because I feel a bit too much like I am being like a boomer, telling the “proverbial kids” to get off my social media lawn. There is use in memes if one is creating them to help people feel scene in their experience of a panoply of emotions that are connected to living as an animate meat sack on this planet. I can point to a ton of examples of people who use meme culture to distill down ideas from their own richly developed philosophies into manageable chunks. That is meme culture as democratizing tool. Yet, the opposite is true as well. They can be used as a propaganda tool for all sorts of nefarious ideologies that have no interest in emancipation. One always risks misinterpretation or co-optation with trying to distill anything down to its simplest articulation.

All this said, I just wonder what role we can still find on instagram for capturing moments of creating things again. I want to get back to a place on the platform where people ordinary people share videos and images of their mundane work. I don’t want any more influencers. I don’t want any more meme decks. I personally unfollow anyone who uses those tools. I suppose that’s why I still post the simple photos of finished weavings and videos of my process. I like the performance art of presenting an image of my process to other people as a way of refining my own self definition of my art. Yet, the question for someone like me who has defined their art practice in the age of social media remains:  Is it the responsibility of a revolutionary art practice to populate the internet with “the real?” In other words, should we make it an aim of our practices to try and enrich internet culture with tiny moments of ritual that get people to to think about inhabiting their own creative processes?

Yes, I must reply in affirmation to this question. The intrinsic utility of values comes to the fore with this. I think that the internet and social media platforms have the capacity to be incredibly emancipatory tools that democratize the art process. Look, ya boi JIM (trademark pending), used this tool to find people to learn from, to create community with, and to evolve with. I think that we should all have the opportunity to have access to this accelerated evolution that can occur in art & craft online circles.  You can still literally just make yourself into someone new online via the copious amounts of information and peer mentoring you can find. That will always be more important than parent influencers dogging on their kids or recycling 10 videos from other platforms. I just want to keep sowing seeds in instagram that leave the possibility open for people to experience some reality on the internet that is closer to just an ordinary person doing a mundane thing with their hands. That can have a particularly shattering effect when people encounter something that is closer to the real than the endless scroll of ads, brand updates, and meme decks. I am looking to retain that quality of my own practice, meaning that I can shatter the facade of the illusory reality for folx by offering ordinary, mundane moments. 

This has all been on my mind as I get back into the work of actually weaving and spinning. I have been plain weaving about 10-20 minutes a day. Just the simple work of taking my handspun and going over under over under over under until my little fabric, an offering to sacred death, is complete. I was out of the game for a hot moment. Honestly, it’s mostly because I don’t natural dye in the winter hardly ever and I have psyched myself out on dyeing more nettle-dyed yarn. When you couple taking on a task that is difficult with recent illnesses and our office retaining normal operations after not having a director for two years, you get craft paralysis. So, I have been getting myself going with small doses of the work that I love. Great almighty glob, does plain weave feel good. It’s bringing on all the feels and quiet space. I feel the movement is working as I tell myself that this will be the day the dye pots will come out and we can keep going. 

One of the hilarious things about me loving plain weave so much is that nobody cares about plain weave.  People like to think they enjoy things stripped back to nothing. But they like it as much as they like athletic greens or mindfulness capitalism. It’s just a fad in their lives. Even if I pay meta $12 dollars a month to be more visible to people, nobody gonna care about plain weave. Maybe if I create yarn out of my own hair, dye it with my own blood, and vomit on it, then and only then will I move one person to consider to be horrified by my actions. Ok, ok, okay, I promised to not make this essay into installment 2 of the vomit series. But seriously, it’s been one of the greatest jokes of my work with myself that what I love the most is actually thought of as not interesting by a lot of people viewing an image of it. People want you to render your art interesting to them. They want you to embellish. They want it loud. They want it full of a lot of the sorts of things that a straight up plain weaved piece doesn’t do for them. They want their art to be the sort of short, sweet, sugary content that they are force fed by their culture.

“Fitter, healthier, more productive; a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics.”

It’s not that I don’t like to do the spellwork pieces. I actually love them too. Those spell work prices are just exhausting emotionally and spiritually. Stitching spells into a cloth, one pick at a time over a 15-20 hour work period, is an endurance sport for the magic fiber art practitioner. Yet, at the end of 2022 having done like 3 back to back to back fiber spells, I was actually kinda roasted and toasted. So I returned to my simple little handweaving, which is just one of millions of examples of everyday art activity that people engage in that often don’t gain any notice or notoriety in our art world. 

I am toying around with the idea that it truly doesn’t matter whether one receives any recognition for their work. That’s just the normal reality for most people who have created art prior to social media. However, this is one of the worst consequences of learning to be an artist on social media. You crave the recognition that your little pixelated assemblage of your work will give you. You crave that bump of dopamine as the little echo chamber sends you the validation you seek in our doom-pilled 21st century. You have to unlearn creating things for a pixelated representation of your creation, a copy of your original.

It’s rather freeing on the moments I am able to see my creating as just this little activity I do as a ordinary person living a mundane life. I want to argue that these unseen/under appreciated art practices open up the ritual dimension of your art as a ritual for yourself and no one else. Your rituals don’t need to amuse or entertain anyone. They sure as hell don’t need to be content for anyone. They can just be plain and spare. Focusing on what works best for myself like this has always worked for me. That’s how I gave up the ghost on mindfulness and became a druid. That’s why I don’t really run a “business” and don’t think of myself as a “content creator” or “ influencer. I don’t make decisions on what I will write about based on a purposeful “content creation” strategy to get out in front of what messages I thought were resonating with people. No, I just write and make what matters to me. I am an ordinary dude, doing mundane things, just trying to chronicle my struggles and triumphs as an animate meat sack in this perplexing time continuum. I make art and hope to do it for a long time.

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